Even then he had always been last. The decisive crack in the sidewalk had always, somehow, seemed farther away to him than it had to the other alley stubs. Even then he had blinked and goggled and furrowed his forehead and bit his tongue in tossing while those who lagged easily did the winning. Twenty years – and he still put his face too close to others when he spoke, still peered hopefully through double-lensed glasses as if trying to see whether there’d be a beer cork or two left for Solly.
Still sauntered down the one-way alleys between Division Street and the Armitage Avenue carbarns with some forgotten eye of childhood alert for anything that might be turned into a spot of cash.
The sights and sounds of the alleyways by morning were different for Sparrow than those of the boulevards and the car lines. He heard them as familiarly as a nature lover hears murmurs of a forest morning. The clomp-clomp of Western Dairy steeds and the clatter of tardy milkmen up back stairs and down two steps at a time, the newsboy wheeling down a gangway on a bicycle and the morning greeting of the rolled paper thudding neatly and accurately against the wrong door, the odor of fresh rolls off the bakery truck – home sights, home sounds and home smells for Solly Saltskin.
He stole a copy of the Tribune off some newsboy’s two-wheeled cart and two chocolate-covered bismarcks off a bakery truck, just to feel freedom returning to his shaken spirit.
‘I may die poor,’ he felt with his returning strength, ‘but I won’t die tied. It’s not for me, the common-law life.’ And fed the second doughnut to Bogacz the Milkman’s horse. ‘You married, horse?’ Sparrow asked in his rasping whisper.
The old stallion rolled one white, derisive eye: he saw so many of this aimless order of alley wanderers, forever emerging out of the shadows to feed him stolen restaurant sugar or doughnuts or salt he didn’t really want. He took them only because he sometimes got lonely himself over the week ends. Though knowing there are worse things than loneliness along the long hard road to the glue works.
Sparrow heard the milkman’s container tinkling somewhere behind him and a hangover of guilt, from some half-forgotten caper among some other milkie’s quarts and pints, caught him and he crossed the avenue to scurry down the opposite alley.
Toward noon he spotted a likely-looking terrier frolicking by itself in a yard behind a chili parlor. He had it wagging its stump of a tail, his hand on its collar – worth a dollar-fifty itself – when he glanced over his shoulder and saw an overweight gorilla in an apron stained with chili like freshly spattered blood and a meat cleaver in one paw, surveying him silently from behind the screened doorway.
Sparrow cooed swift love words at the pup and fed it an invisible dog biscuit – the screen door opened and again he ran for it. When he glanced back the cook was leaning over the fence, cleaver dangling and the whole man measuring him for future decapitation.
Sparrow didn’t linger: the incident had proven to him that the heyday of dog stealing was gone with the miniature golf courses and Star and Garter burlesque. There was no sort of living left in the alleys, it seemed. It was all on the streets nowadays.
He had been dependent upon Frankie and Violet too long. Where would he go when the sawbuck out of Vi’s apron was gone? he wondered uneasily. It looked like a long cold winter for Solly Saltskin.
He caught up on his sleep curled up on the Widow Wieczorek’s pool table, curtained off from her bar, using a rack wrapped in his baseball cap for a pillow. The Widow had been widowed so long she’d cut her hair short and grown a mustache. She didn’t mind one of the boys sleeping on the table if he lifted a couple with her first. She shook him awake toward two o’clock and he idled the rest of that bright afternoon away watching Gringo Guns in the roaring darkness of the Pulaski.
When he came out the evening light lay like a dreamer with sunburned flanks across the dreaming city: water towers, steeples and rooftops, all lay adrift in an amber sea; till the wind below began to search, in hallway and alley and yard, for the place where pale night was hiding.
A wind that stirred nothing else than a kite caught on a telephone wire. A kite of such a darkling red, with that lowering orange sun behind it flooding the heart-shaped wound where the wires ran it through, that it looked to be bleeding. The merciless city wires, upon which it tried to turn a bit, first this way and then that so helplessly, were tinted red from that enormous wound. Sparrow watched it flutter up there with the first rumors of evening, and his own heart pinked with the wind. The frail cross of the kite’s frame hung as piteously as his own heart had hung, since Frankie had gone to jail, to the taut and insulated steel. Goggling upward at it, shivering a bit in the shabby coat, he felt for a moment as if he too were something impaled on city wires for only tenement winds to touch.
He had nine dollars left in his pocket and knew just the place to build it up to forty. All you needed to sit in on a stud session at Kippel’s was a five-dollar bill on the board before you. ‘I could lick them rag sheenies every day ’n twice on Yom Kippur,’ he decided, taking the alleys toward Damen and Division.
He took a seat at the corner table, folding his nine singles to look like eighteen and declared himself casually – ‘from the pocket’ – to indicate he reserved the privilege of reaching for his empty wallet. It was seven-card, two down, four open and the last one closed and he didn’t glance at the closed pair till the first open card hit him: two blood-red jacks hiding just as the third jack slid in face up to meet its relations. Three J-boys wired, this was Solly Saltskin’s night. He glanced one suspicious second at the dealer, saw he was just some run-of-the-mill houseman and that three jacks were just luck for one punk whose luck, God knew, was long overdue for a change. All he had to do was to suck the mockies in softly.
The mockies were wary of the new hand: he looked too simple to be quite true. Each felt he had seen the punk around before; but none could give him a name or place him. Kippel’s players were Jews and this was a Jew – yet one who didn’t somehow belong. They sensed a renegade.
They sensed it in the first-generation Polish inflection which association with Frankie Machine had lent him. They sensed it in the baseball cap, tilted at the jaunty Polish angle, instead of a conservative felt pulled down a bit over the ears. Kippel’s customers wore white shirts and dark jazzbows and not one tie in that whole circle gave promise of lighting up even for a moment. ‘What’s the matter – no gamblers in the house?’ Sparrow asked with real resentment as, one by one, they dropped off from the challenge of the hidden jacks.
For, like the Jewish fighters, the Jewish gamblers were counterpunchers. They could wait on the defensive forever, hoarding their strength, their cunning and their cards for the single opening as though one opening were all that were granted a man in one lifetime.
They had learned that the one blow, the one ace, the single chance had to be the decisive one. They knew that for them there would be no consolation honors and no second chance. There was the knowledge of the long-hunted: to turn swiftly, with open claws at the very moment of disaster, upon the undefeated hunter.
For the hunter there was always another day. When the hunted lost they lost for keeps.